In order to overcome defects of the classical hidden Markov model (HMM),Markov family model (MFM),a new statistical model was proposed.Markov family model was applied to speech recognition and natural language processing.The speaker independently continuous speech recognition experiments and the part-of-speech tagging experiments show that Markov family model has higher performance than hidden Markov model.The precision is enhanced from 94.642％ to 96.214％ in the part-of-speech tagging experiments,and the work rate is reduced by 11.9％ in the speech recognition experiments with respect to HMM baseline system.